Waiting for the camera, they passed days of airless quiet and great heat. Shell-gatherers were warned from the beaches. The highest palms hung motionless, and nothing was audible but the long lines of breakers. The trades were noticeable at the highest elevations only around dusk.

Each day they lunched on parrot fish and rice pudding, squinting out at the intense glare of a cloudless oceanic afternoon. Murnau’s bare feet would usually be in the sun and he’d be distracted by the worry that they were already getting pink. As if they had nothing better to do, they resumed their argument.

Flaherty would assert that they had a responsibility to the truth. Murnau would respond, in his schoolmaster’s tone, that truth wasn’t in the slavish recording of data but in the emotion and the drama. A filmed record of the islands would convey their essence no more effectively than a fictionalized drama. All memories were acts of imagination, and to assume anything else was bottomless innocence.

“I find it completely characteristic that you don’t drink,” Flaherty stated at one point, apropos of nothing. Neither David nor Murnau responded.

Mr. Drunkard refused to believe that Murnau’s abstinence was due to kidney trouble.

The arguments came to nothing. Knowing how fond Murnau was of the Bali, Flaherty took to wearing heavy-soled shoes that would scratch the polished deck.

But it was Murnau’s job to hold their little group together. He told Flaherty he was sorry they’d gotten to this position, and that Flaherty’s film was not lost. There’d still be much of the sort of thing he wanted to record: the hunters’ strength and honesty, a Nature at once bountiful and pitiless, as well as the heartbreak of the slow disintegration of paradise.

But Tabu would not pretend that it was not a film. It would make use of the tricks of the trade. They would be done discreetly or not at all. They’d point up the emphasis of the story and not disfigure it.

Flaherty listened impatiently to such talk and then would get up and lurch inside to replace his bottle. Often he wouldn’t reappear for half an hour, and his brother would finally go to look for him.

One afternoon after David brought him back, they all watched Mehao spearfishing a hundred yards down the beach. At that distance he had the appearance of a dark Aeneas. His dress was traditional but his spear was metal, probably from San Francisco.

Murnau finally remarked that he didn’t think it was possible any longer to get an idea of the old Tahitian customs by observation. It was like staring at a Norwegian and hoping to learn about the Vikings.

Flaherty responded that he’d asked the natives who worked at the Residency about that boy. They’d described him as a mahu. An effeminate person.